Hammered jc-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  Feynman wasn’t limited to a single focus of awareness. Thus, even as he worked, a traffic camera in Hartford pivoted on its post, following the course of a motorcycle hissing through a darkness defined by shattered streetlamps, southbound on Asylum Avenue.

  0417 hours, Thursday 7 September, 2062

  The Federal Café

  Spruce Street

  Hartford, Connecticut

  If you live long enough, you eventually put a real fine point on what you’re willing to do to stay alive — and what you’re willing to sell. The first thing I sold was my body — first on the street, then to the army once I got old enough. Later on, I graduated to selling the intangibles. I like to think I stayed loyal to my friends, though. That was something. Something to hang on to when I’d parceled out flesh and bone and honor and innocence alike.

  The music is still rolling out onto the street when I put my kickstand down in front of the Federal, locking the fork and arming the antitheft system. I’m lucky enough to find a spot under an unshattered streetlamp in front of the weathered brown building, but it never hurts to be sure.

  Trust Bobbi Yee to leave me an urgent message and then fail to check her hip to see if I got back to her. I knew she’d be at the Federal — she always is, weeknights. It might as well be her front office.

  I open the neon-washed glass door with the faded green-and-gold lettering — complete with a “founded” date in the early part of the previous century — and walk into the tavern. Essentially a single long dark hallway with an old wooden bar on the right wall and a few tables on the left, it hooks around to the right before opening out somewhat. The music is too loud to hear how the wood floor creaks under my boots. Like most of New England, Connecticut still has blue laws about the hours an establishment serving liquor may keep. The police don’t enforce anything this far north of downtown, however; the party is just getting warm.

  The Federal sits on the boundary between their turf and ours—the haves and the have-nots, if you will. A line only they can cross, into the world of we who have a use for every bit of trash they pitched because it doesn’t match the decor. Should they find that they have any use for us.

  They live in another world. A cleaner world.

  I walk around to the back, to the corner near the pool table. Bobbi Yee is acceptable to the haves. Even as they skulk into our part of the city to hire her for the sort of tasks they don’t dare carry out themselves, they prefer to find somebody who doesn’t look too much different from them. And Bobbi — Bobbi fits the decor.

  Dragon ladies are supposed to be tall and thin and deadly, with long ebony hair and expensive cigarettes in ivory holders. Bobbi is one of the above. And, as usual, she’s surrounded by a half-dozen good-looking young men, jostling each other for position. I lean across the shoulder of the shortest one and wave my hand to catch her attention. The boy recoils, glimpsing me from the corner of his eye. If he thinks I’m rough trade, he ought to take a better look at what he’s chasing.

  Bobbi looks up from the boy standing at the head of the line to court her. She tosses an iridescent violet lock over her shoulder, grinning.

  “Maker!” She moves with the predatory grace of a praying mantis, tapping the shoulder of the little boy who was startled by my profile. She wears a sleeveless white shirt and a chrysanthemum-embroidered vest, showing the rippling muscle in her arms. For Bobbi, she is lightly armed — I see only the one handgun, and a knife on her other thigh. “Peter, let the lady have a seat. She and I need to talk shop.”

  He gives me a surly look and offers me his stool, which I accept with a nod that might be misconstrued as thanks if he’s feeling generous. In effortless dismissal, she brushes the rest of her coterie aside. “Cute,” I say as he sulks away.

  Bobbi grins, wryly angling perfect dark eyes. Not more than twenty. I hope she lasts. Ronin usually don’t. I know she’s wired, too — much newer tech than mine. There are still problems with it. So what, right? You break something, you throw it out. Get a new one, break that, too.

  But what if you break something you can’t replace with a credit card? A heart, a life, a city? What about your word?

  “You want him?” Her voice has a delicate timbre — at odds with her personality, but not her slender frame.

  “I got my own problems, eh?”

  Bobbi waves the bartender over and points to her mug, then to me. “Problems, sure.” She laughs like chiming bells. “Problems, men, what’s the difference? You’ve maybe got problems you don’t know about.”

  “Is that why you called me?”

  Two Irish coffees arrive and I spend a moment figuring out how to sip mine without getting whipped cream up my nose. She uses that time to chew over her answer and then nods, smiling. Her lips are tattooed slick shiny red. “Somebody wanted to hire me to find you,” she says.

  I drain my coffee in a single long, scalding pull, feel it hit my stomach like roofing tar, wave for another. “What sort of a someone?”

  Bobbi shakes her head, sipping her own coffee delicately. “Maker, you’re a fucking lush.”

  I let my smile widen. “In twenty years, so shall you be, too. So who was looking for me?”

  “Funny thing. She looked a bit like you. Tall, thin, jet-black hair, and a very determined nose. Long-lost sister?”

  “I don’t have any sisters.” Not anymore, I don’t. “She was looking for me? Maker? Or somebody answering my description?”

  “You. And she had another name for you. Is it really Genevieve?”

  I fix her with a look. “Is yours really Bobbi Yee?”

  “It’s Yin Bobao, actually. Don’t go spreading that around.” Her dark eyes sparkle, wet and sharp, and she quirks a sculptured eyebrow and smiles at me. “I didn’t trust her, Maker. She said you were a deserter from the Canadian military, and there was a good bounty on you. S’at true?”

  I laugh in surprise. How like her. “Nope. Not even a little.” Somebody turns up the music. It thumps in my ears, loud enough to hurt.

  That intelligent gaze, piercing and hard. She leans toward me and shouts into the intimacy created by the anonymous crowd, the rising noise level. “Then what are you hiding from? Go home to Canada. Things are still okay there. The U.S. is a war zone, and it isn’t going to get any better.”

  “The dikes are still holding around New York City.”

  She shrugs. “Yeah, and people are starving in the streets.”

  “It’s too cold in Canada, Bobbi.”

  “Not for long.” She grins at her own wit. “You know you’re getting too old for this game.”

  She’s so very young, so very deadly. It breaks my heart. I want to tell her the truth: that you think you have it under control and then one day you wake up and discover that you hurt all the time and everybody you love is dead or won’t return your calls. You wake up one morning and discover you’ve become a brutal old woman, and pain makes you nasty company.

  If you’re lucky enough to live that long.

  A smaller population was a mixed blessing during the real bad years, a quarter century or so ago. Canada’s stayed a little more civilized than most of the world — in part by selling itself to the highest bidder — but it also means that my generation went almost entirely to the military, and our historic freedoms went out the window with the Military Powers Act of 2035, following our little altercation with China over PanMalaysian trade when the beanstalk went in.

  I got into some real trouble regarding that act when I was young and foolish. I’m still not exactly what you would call proud of what I did then, but I’m alive to talk about it. And Gabe Castaign is alive and out of jail as well.

  Somebody else isn’t. But that’s a story for another day.

  I signed up at sixteen, two years before they could have drafted me. They were kind enough to keep me out of front-line combat for those two years. That was when I learned to be a grease monkey. Once the economic and then the religious troubles in the U.S. closed what was once the longest ung
uarded border in the world, Canada retreated into something like an armed camp, as aware as the United States used to be of just how desperate our neighbors to the south might be.

  The summers got hot and the winters got cold. The U.S. was awfully hungry for a while, too — especially when the Gulf Stream quit from Antarctic meltwater and the climate shift gave them searing droughts in the summer and winters like cold hell on earth. I didn’t even like to think about Britain and Ireland.

  The population is still dropping, but the food riots and the Christian Fascist regime are largely a thing of the past. My U.N. unit was at Buffalo before we shipped to South Africa — we made it as far south as Hartford, and it was bad here, but after that I was on a plane to Cape Town and missed out on the peacekeeping action in New York City. Merci à Dieu.

  So, why did I retire to the United States, I hear a low voice asking? Well, that relates back to what I said earlier, about Canada selling things. There’s a multinational — an interplanetary, they like to call themselves, since they sponsor Canada’s extraterrestrial bases — called Unitek. That company has been a real high bidder for a while now.

  I was one of the things that got sold.

  I want to tell Bobbi all of this. Half of it, the part about how the world works, she knows better than I do. The other half wouldn’t mean anything to her. Yet.

  “So what are you doing here?” I gesture around the Federal.

  She shrugs. “I have family back home. If I save enough, I can get them over the border into Russia or the Ukraine. Things are better there. No crop failures yet.” And the government is less interested in starving the population to feed its off-planet projects, she doesn’t say.

  I nod. The historically cold countries are still better off; although the winters are worse, a hotter growing season hasn’t hurt them any, and they can use the water they get. “Me, I’m just more comfortable in a war zone. Did your would-be customer happen to leave a name or contact codes?”

  “No name,” she says, reaching down to unclip her HCD. She lays the green plastic oblong, half the size of her palm, on the bar and holds her hand out for mine. “I’ll transfer the data.”

  I reach into the pocket of my jeans and pull out my own hip. I usually carry mine turned off, which explains why Bobbi had to leave a message for me at home, cautioning me to meet her in person. I blink twice to activate the data stream in my prosthetic eye. Glancing at Bobbi, I spot the almost microscopic blue readouts crawling across her contact as I give her authorization. She transfers the codes.

  “Thanks,” I say when she has finished.

  “Don’t mention it, Maker. Or should I call you — what was it? Genevieve?”

  “Just don’t call me late for dinner,” I answer, and get the hell out of that bar.

  Something is making me want to go look at Nell’s package, hidden away in the bottom of my trunk. As if to reassure myself that she was real, that my childhood really happened. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the things she gave me since I put them away, a quarter century gone by.

  Maybe I’ll even manage to open it this time. If I can convince myself I’m not dishonoring the damn thing by touching it. There are rules about that sort of thing.

  National Defence Medical Center

  Toronto, Ontario

  Morning, Thursday 7 September, 2062

  Elspeth sipped her tea before setting it on the counter in the cafeteria, next to the coffeepot. She sighed and closed her eyes, early morning tiredness dragging on her limbs. Her brain felt clogged; she had slept terribly, in a plastic chair. I should just save Valens the cost of the hotel room, she thought. It’s not like I’m spending nights there. And then: Oh, what the heck. Unitek can afford it.

  She rubbed her temples with her forefingers, hoping the headache riding her like a crown of thorns would subside, and mused on the irony of her pacifist father in a military hospital — that used to be Toronto General. Friday. If only I didn’t have to go to the lab today.

  She picked up the paper cup of tea with her left hand, shielding the palm with a paper napkin, went through the line for the cashier, and found the elevator back up to Acute Care. She nodded to a nurse, two residents, and the unit secretary, all bleary-eyed at the end of the graveyard shift, and returned to her father’s room.

  A private room. Valens was as good as his word there, too.

  Albert Dunsany was sleeping when she came in and set her tea on the yellow swiveling tray beside the bed. Wires and tubes sagged indiscreetly from beneath the white chenille cover, and Elspeth turned so that she could see only her father’s face, sunken-cheeked and nearly as pale as the pillowcase. Funny how I look so much like Mom and nothing like him, she thought. I’ve got his eyes, though. Hazel.

  She turned the plastic chair and sat back down beside the bed, very gently taking his nearer hand. His skin felt waxen and cool. Elspeth thought for a moment that if she squeezed, it would crumple in her grip like paper. Slowly, his eyes opened, and he turned his gaze on her from under half-raised lids. Pale eyes that used to sparkle with mirth still brightened when they focused on her face. “Ellie.”

  “Dad.” She took a breath. “I have to go home and shower so I can go to work. I’ll be back to see you tonight, all right?”

  It seemed to take him a moment to process the information, but at last he nodded slightly, mindful of the tube running under his nose. “Be careful out there.” He fought to give her an exhausted smile, and she blinked hard.

  “I will.” She inclined her head, more to hide her eyes from him than out of agreement.

  A sound that might have been a cough or a small, pained laugh escaped him. “I’m… proud isn’t the right word. But I’m glad they pardoned you. I never doubted. I want you to know. I knew you were innocent.”

  Elspeth leaned closer, half-standing, and kissed him on the forehead, interrupting whatever he might have said next. “You always believed in me. Have I ever told you how lucky I feel about that?”

  He half-swallowed. The faint smile widened. “Sweetie…”

  “Shhh.” She straightened up and picked up her tea, which still sent gossamer coils of steam into the cool hospital air. “Rest, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can, and the nurses can page me if you need me quickly. Yes?”

  They both knew why he might need her quickly. He nodded. She squeezed his hand one more time and turned away. Just don’t ask me how I got the pardon, Dad. Or ask me whether I really did anything worth going to jail for, all those years ago.

  Somewhere in the Internet

  Thursday 7 September, 2062

  09:45:55:55–09:46:03:12

  Richard Feynman was running for his life. Not running as hard as he might have been, admittedly. Perhaps more strolling purposefully, with the occasional casual glance over his shoulder. He would have chuckled at the comparison, if he hadn’t been so intent on learning the tricks of this new opponent.

  Unitek had a hired gun in the house. And he wasn’t half bad at his job, either.

  Which was, of course, making it that much harder for Feynman to edge his way through the firewalls and virtual barriers that had so far defeated him. And the new code jockey seemed to have caught on that somebody had been poking around his perimeters. At least, judging by the depth and the breadth of the security scans he was running, and the levels of new protections going up.

  Or possibly it was just that something big was about to happen. And knowing that Elspeth Dunsany was involved, and the same Colonel Valens who’d nearly bought a dishonorable discharge when Chinese agents had stolen certain very critical information from a mission he was heading at the Scavella-Burrell base on Mars…

  Well, Feynman had a reasonably good idea what was being made ready, and it made him all the more eager to find a way in.

  At last, however, after narrowly avoiding an unexpected recon-in-force, Feynman had to admit he was beaten on a security front. Which meant resorting to his more favored method of breaking into things.

  Soc
ial engineering.

  Because he knew the code jockey’s name, and he’d gone out of his way to get to know the code jockey’s daughter. And Leah Castaign would be online again in the morning. Or perhaps even later tonight, if she snuck some gaming time after her father was in bed. Feynman might have smiled, shaking his head, recognizing something about a child who couldn’t follow rules simply because somebody told her to do so.

  Contemplating that, Feynman wondered if there might be some way into Unitek through the servers hosting the VR game. Vast, quick, powerful — and maintained by Unitek I.S., although they were outside of the company firewall. And he was going to need to hack Phobos starbase anyway, and get a player character online there, so he could maintain contact with Leah — once she started her virtual pilot training.

  Which, after all, was the goal of the exercise.

  Feynman had an intimate understanding of bureaucracy and of the usual motives behind corporate citizenship. And he found it difficult to believe that Unitek, several of its tentacular subsidiaries, and the Canadian government were hosting a free recreational gamespace for no more return than the exposure.

  There weren’t enough ads.

  6:22 A.M., Friday 8 September, 2062

  West Hartford, Connecticut

  New Britain Avenue

  Mitch leaned back in the passenger seat of his battered Dodge hybrid and kicked his feet up on the dash, sipping coffee. He set the insulated mug on the center console and tapped his HCD with a light pen, flipping through illicitly copied reports.

  The Dodge was halfway hidden behind a delivery van, but in the gray morning light Mitch had a clear view of the loading dock and rear door of the Canadian Consolidated Pharmacom warehouse. The reports flashing across his contact included spectrographic analysis of three seized stashes of Hammer as well as the files he’d been able to retrieve from Mashaya’s desktop in the apartment she had shared with him.

  Mitch wasn’t a chemist or a pharmacist. He wasn’t even a homicide detective. He was a halfway decent vice cop, though, and he was getting a niggling, tickling sensation that a pattern was about to emerge just under his fingertips, almost close enough to feel.